People judge third-party anger as a signal of moral character

Abstract

Judging others' moral character is a vital and necessary task for navigating the social world. Extending work on the function of emotions, we propose that people use others' emotions to infer their moral character. We focused on anger, an emotion that is often viewed as undesirable. We hypothesized that anger could serve as a signal of moral character, specifically when experienced after observing a third-party moral violation (i.e., when one individual behaves immorally toward another). We first examined this hypothesis by showing that people not only judged the observer who felt angry to be a better person (Studies 1–2), but they also trusted the observer more (Study 3). In Study 4, we found that such inferences can be drawn when anger was displayed, and this effect was much more pronounced for third-party violations compared to when people were treated immorally themselves. Further, we explored whether the positive effect from anger is unique from sympathy (Study 5) and cognitive recognition of the violation (6a, and 6b), and found that anger elicited a similar level of positive moral character judgment as sympathy and cognitive recognition of the violation. However, different from recognition of the violation, anger is associated with a higher expectation of behavioral engagement. These studies not only demonstrate the moral character signaling function of emotions but also contribute to an understanding of the processes by which individuals infer moral character in others.